NAVY ‘STANDS DOWN’ AIR WING, AS CUTS BEGIN

Budget cuts hit Navy, Marine Corps operations, maintenance facilities

The skies and waters of San Diego will become quieter as the Navy slashes ship training and even stands down an air wing in response to sweeping automatic budget cuts triggered Friday.

Even if you didn’t regard military jet and helicopter noise as the “sound of freedom,” the cuts will hurt San Diego in the pocketbook, as more than 24,000 civilian government defense employees lose one paid day a week starting in April.

Defense contractors are expected to issue pink slips. Some have already started.

Under what’s known as sequestration, the Pentagon will be forced to slice its budget by $55 billion annually for a decade. This year, the cut is expected to be between $42 billion and $47 billion from a $525 billion base defense budget.

This sequester of funding stems from a 2011 budget deal intended to force Congress to create a deficit-busting package of spending cuts and tax changes. But that politically difficult solution never materialized, and after a two-month delay, the hammer dropped Friday.

The thud was heard around military-rich San Diego, home to the Navy SEALs, much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and one of the Marine Corps’ three expeditionary forces. About 109,000 active-duty troops are stationed in the county, almost evenly split between Marines and sailors.

At military offices, leaders are still wondering how it will play out, awaiting specifics that started to drip out Friday and will likely flow more freely next week.

“We are trying to preserve flexibility and will not make final decisions about cuts until absolutely necessary,” said Cmdr. Charlie Brown, spokesman for the Navy’s 3rd Fleet, headquartered in Point Loma. “We will continue to support our forward-deployed forces and do our best to preserve the readiness of those next to deploy.”

The big news for the Navy is that a San Diego-based aircraft wing attached to the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan will be idled starting in April.

The announcement will affect F/A-18 Hornet fighter jets stationed in Central California’s Lemoore air base and San Diego-based helicopters assigned to the carrier. The Reagan recently emerged from a year of maintenance in Puget Sound and likely faces months of training before it might deploy, anyway.

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said at a Pentagon news conference that four of the Navy’s nine air wings would “stand down.”

The Navy provided information that the first will be the Reagan in April. Following that will be air wings assigned to the Washington state-based John C. Stennis, the San Diego-based Carl Vinson and the Virginia-based Eisenhower. Two others will be reduced to sustainment-only levels.

These are the first pieces of the Navy’s planned response to the sequester cuts. The sea service openly warned that it would be forced to scratch ship deployments, and over the weekend officials said the San Diego-based frigate Thach will return home early from a deployment to South America.

Its list, first released in January and updated in mid-February, included 10 destroyers, seven of which were scheduled to provide ballistic missile defense for the United States and its allies. It also said it would cancel deployment preparation for San Diego aircraft carriers Reagan and Vinson.